New edition of CAB Thesaurus published

The 2014 edition of the CAB Thesaurus, which covers agriculture, life sciences, human health, and related subjects, was published on 21st July 2014. The web site at http://www.cabi.org/cabthesaurus/ has been updated and the new thesaurus has been integrated in all of CABI's publishing processes.

The following lists some of the changes since the previous edition was published in September 2012:

All 1300 full datasheets in the Aquaculture Compendium were reviewed and missing species, diseases names, etc. were added.

Reptiles were completely reviewed and many species added and taxonomy corrected.

Complete revision of Miridae, plant bugs, which are important plant pests.

Chromista have been incorporated; many higher level taxa have been moved about, changed or added accordingly.

Revised all algae, which hadn’t been tackled in many years. Many new species have been added and taxonomy fixed according to AlgaeBase.

Fixed chemical hierarchies to correct inconsistencies.

Improved the SKOS output.

Updated sample data files for download. The full thesaurus files are available in several formats on request.

The total number of terms has grown by 5.7% to 264,518. The CAB Thesaurus is available in eleven languages.

There are many individual changes to taxonomy of scientific names, and many terms have been added according to user requests.

The next edition of the thesaurus is planned for early 2016. Many things are on the agenda, the most important of which include publishing the thesaurus as Linked Open Data, revising plant hierarchies according to the APG III system, adding outstanding species from the MEDANI (Medical and Veterinary Arthropod Name Index) database, expanding coverage of vector-borne diseases, and restoring the structure of the classified thesaurus last published in 1999 in addition to the current thesaurus structure.